eBooks have changed the way we think of value in regards to books. For myriad reasons, ebookers think that the price of ebooks should be no more than the price of a mass market paperback, and often less. Price is a reflection of value.Much of the thinking revolves around a central point: unlike pbooks, ebooks are intangible — just a collection of bits and bytes. Yes, there are other reasons, too, such as the lack of secondary market value, lower production costs, restrictions on usage, and the like, but the reality is that most of the conscious and unconscious reasoning revolves around the matter of intangibility.

I've got exciting news to announce today: Goodreads now has 10 million members! To put this in perspective, it took four and a half years to reach 5 million members and only another 15 months to double that number. Today, six books are added on Goodreads per second.We've come a long way since Elizabeth and I built Goodreads from our living room, motivated by the belief that there was a better way to discover and discuss good books—and that we could build it.

Now, succession planners have shifted their sights from the lowly hyperlink to the seemingly indomitable e-reader. Earlier this year, the Pew Research Center calculated that the percentage of Americans who own e-reading devices doubled last December. Christmas, for centuries the publishing industry’s busiest season, became a gift to hardware manufacturers. And last year, Amazon announced it was selling more e-books than print books — hardcover and paperback combined.

Starting this fall, the 220-member library cooperative Califa Library Group will begin rolling out a $325,000 project with the goal of buying from the smaller publishing companies thousands of e-books that the libraries will own forever. San Francisco and most other libraries lease their collection through OverDrive, a digital distribution company."With the vendors, their motivation is to make money, so we're lining their pockets and we have no flexibility or ownership," said Heather Teysko, director of development and innovation at Califa.Teysko said about 50 publishers, mostly independent, have shown interest so far. The project will be piloted in the Contra Costa County Library system first and should be implemented in San Francisco by February or March, she said.

Not long ago, an aspiring book writer rejected by traditional publishing houses had only one alternative: vanity publishing. For $5,000 or $10,000, or sometimes much more, he could have his manuscript edited and published, provided that he agreed to buy many copies himself, often a few thousand or more. They typically ended up in the garage.Digital technology has changed all that. A writer turned down by traditional publishers — or even avoiding them — now has a range of options. Among them are self-publishing a manuscript as an e-book; self-publishing through myriad companies that print on demand, in which a paperback or hardcover book is printed each time it is purchased; and buying an array of services, from editing and design to marketing and publicity, from what are known as assisted self-publishing companies.

Sony introduced today Reader™ (PRS-T2), a light and thin 6” eReader with an enhanced, intuitive touch screen optimized for long-term reading and the most natural, immersive reading experience. Available in three colors – white, red or matte black – Reader offers new social features and a simplified and intuitively designed home screen.

I am one of those people who has a lot of ebooks in various formats. I also have a separate reader for each and every format: Adobe Reader for PDF files, Kindle for AZW and KF8, EPUB for epub, Microsoft Reader for lit and the list goes on and on.Frankly it became quite exhausting after a while. I then figured that if I could convert all the ebooks in to one general format I wouldn’t require a whole lot of software to babysit. This is how I ran into Calibre in the first place. Don’t let it fool you though. There’s a lot more to it than just converting ebooks!

Let me fast-forward to the crux of our conversation. Which was that conventional publishing is (how can I put this delicately?) fucked up beyond belief, now that all major book publishers have been bought up by mega-corporations and are interested only in blockbusters, and only those authors who are represented by top-flight literary agents. And only those with a very recent track record of mega-stardom.You may think (as I did) that this means, simply, that new authors and fresh voices in fiction are effectively locked out due to the "old boy network" that has always dominated publishing. But in reality, it's much worse than that.

There might be no worse feeling in the world than missing out on a great opportunity.That’s what publishers of illustrated books may be feeling right now as they watch traditional immersive reading publishers (you know: fiction, non-fiction, mostly text) fill their coffers with e-book and digital publishing revenues.Basically, publishers of The Hunger Games and 50 Shades of Grey are selling e-books by the gigabyte while many publishers of cookbooks and picture books are struggling to find digital footing. For example, the Quarto Group, a London-based illustrated book publisher made $1.6 million on digital publishing in the first half of 2012 — only 2.2% of its revenue in that period. Compare that with Simon & Schuster, which gets some 21% of its revenues from digital — and this is typical among similar publishers. Worse for Quarto is that digital growth at the company is slowing, according to its CEO.

New York Times E-Book Best Sellers

A version of this list appears in the August 26, 2012 issue of The New York Times Book Review. Rankings reflect sales for the week ending August 11, 2012.